Hot air balloon with journey banner design

The village women sewed the silk into a bag the size of a barn while the brothers built a fire pit in the orchard. They lit it on the feast of the Assumption, and the bag swelled, striped red and white like the abbey's awnings, and rose trembling over the cloister wall. Brother Anselm stood in the basket with his ledger under one arm and a rusted ship's anchor tied to the rim, because the miller's boy had told him that a heavy thing keeps a light thing from flying off.

The wind carried him east over the apple trees, then over the wool merchant's road, where a carter shouted up that he had lost his hat. Anselm called back that the hat would find its own way home, as everyone did eventually. By the time the sun laid its long rays across the stubble, the anchor was dragging through the furrows below, and he found he was neither hungry nor afraid, only curious what the next hill looked like.

When the flame guttered and the vespers bell rang faintly far behind him, he understood what the anchor was for. It had never been meant to hold him down. It let him drift low enough to read the names of the villages and call them out, so that the places he had only heard about became places he had passed over. He came down at dusk in a field near the coast, and the farmer's daughter found him asleep with the ledger open to a blank page and a pencil in his hand.